Parenting Tips for Building Early Literacy: Are You Raising an Olympic Reader?

Children are in school 900 hours per year. They are outside the home 7,800 hours per years. What this means for reading is that parents must be held accountable for their childrens' learning and behavior! Those of us who know what to do should communicate it to our children and this means that in order for us to raise proficient readers, we need to have the right fertilizer at home.

Read, read, read!

The single most important activity for building the knowledge required for eventual success in reading is reading aloud to children. The solution is to motivate children to read more outside school!

Jim Trelease, bestselling author of The Read-Aloud Handbook, firmly believes in creating a major campaign to help parents change their habits. In the 1960's for example, a major campaign developed to stop the number of smokers in the United States, and it worked. The same kind of campaign Trelease argues, is needed now to get parents to read to their children! The campaign has three components: Inform, Scare, and Shame. (Guilt) Trelease firmly believes that it is acceptable and even necessary to make parents feel guilty about what they are neglecting to do; Only then will they see how they are hurting their children, and want to change their habits and start reading to their children.

So the purpose of this article, is to sensitize you to the importance of building literacy from a young age and here are a few tips to help get you started:

1. Do not put a TV set in a child's room. One study showed that children who have a TV set in their bedrooms have lower math and reading scores. An average child spends 1,460 hours per year in front of a screen (TV, computer, cell phone, games, etc.) That equals 392 viewings of the movie, "Gone with the Wind!"

2. Remember the the THREE B'S that are important to have in the home - Books, Book Baskets and Bedlamp. Parents can find a box and decorate it. they can make two - one for the bathroom, and one for the kitchen because if children red while they eat, they are never alone. No medical study has ever found proof that reading in dim light before going to bed is harmful to a person's vision. So let your children stay up later than usual if they are reading!

Climate does affect reading scores. What that means is that there must be plenty of print in the classrooms, at home and in the community to raise "Olympic" readers. One study showed that in Beverly Hills, there was an average of 199 books in the home, while in Watts, the average was .04!

3. Put Close-Captioning on TV's. Finland has the highest reading levels in the world. They have no national testing and no national curriculum. 90% of their children are in childcare by age one. In this childcare settings, they watch a lot of American television (many old sitcomes) that are captioned in their native language. That is what motivates them to learn to read quickly! On that note, Jim Trelease suggests that close-captioning should be put on all TV's and parents should use it instead of the audio for children while they watch. Trelease also espouses the ideas of using books on CD's, the purpose being that parents must put books in their children's hands so they can hear someone reading the story to them!

Betty Hart and Todd Risley did a long-term study to find out how many words per day children ages 6 months to 4 years heard in their homes. There is a huge gap between the rich, the middle and lower class. Schools can't change this. It must happen at home! So the final word is to read to your children!